Idea generation in our Venture Studio.

Problem: This is a very niche/specific problem, so a great starting point. Consulting is huge right now: EY, KPMG, Accenture and more are having an amazing time overall. Making tons of money by hiring young grads to consult CEO’s with 30+ years of experience on how to run their companies.

But there is also another branch of consulting: External L&D (Learning & Development). Plenty of companies all over the planet need to upskill their workforce, specifically the soft skills and collaboration component.

Often times, they end up reaching out to trainers/facilitators to build novel experiences for them. There’s a massive industry of employee experience design laying in wait right behind your HR Leader.

Target: Trainers, facilitators, team-building experience makers etc.

Solution: A teambuilding/workshop marketplace where trainers and experience makers can license concepts developed by other facilitators or experience designers.

Each licensed element would contain details like budget, resources needed, skills trained and world-building details.

Benefits:

• For facilitators, easy to source the right experience for your future participants.

• For experience designers, monetizing your concepts without needing to build your own portfolio of clients.

• Reviews, testimonials and culture-fit will deliver the best experiences for the participants.

Challenges:

• How to protect your IP: designing an experience is not easy, but it also could leak from participants and providers.

• Licensing model and pricing: what’s a fair pricing model for this to enable facilitators to add their mark-up as well?

• Easy-to-build: Anyone with a bit of free time can build a marketplace, tech won’t be the differentiator here, content will.

Problem: Startups need to experiment fast, usually with no-code tools or basic websites. Implementing payments with Stripe is not as easy as it used to be, especially for marketing teams that don’t know how to code and need to test funnels fast. The real test of any product is “are people willing to pay for this?”

Target: Marketing, growth teams, startups at pre-seed and seed stage.

Solution: A paywall that’s easy to drag-and-drop into no-code platforms and existing websites. You could set basic things like pricing, benefits and trials, but the rest should be standardized to make implementation as easy as possible. Basically drop a link/one line into your existing codebase exactly where you want to add a paywall and block content.

In addition to that, at a later stage, this tool could evolve into analyzing the best position for a paywall on a landing page, and serve users with a trial based on the conversion stage.

Benefits:

• Can use Stripe in the background, is easy to test and implement quickly.

• There’s a startup boom going on, and you can also diversify later on: think about blogs, cooking websites, anyone that generates content and wants to paywall it.

• Win on comissions: business model is obvious, take a comission of the subscription made through the paywall.

Challenges:

• Easy to copy by any senior engineer. Speed is key here.

• Might be too niche: People who start startup might have a tech dev on-board already who can easily integrate Stripe.

• Scalability is high, but this is just one feature… There’s a whole product to be built after this start. Someone with a great vision should be on-board to build this into a proper company.

Problem: When you’re a tourist, you’re vulnerable by design. In a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language, you don’t know the customs, you just start looking like a piggy bank to the locals.

There’s still good people willing to help locally though and they can help you stay away from common scams and tourist traps.

Target: US-tourists (the most vulnerable).

Solution: A website/app/platform where future tourists could visit ahead of time or when they land and learn the most common things to look out for, places where pickpocketters were reported and common phrases to watch out for.

Ok, but who’s creating the content? That’s a lot of content…

The best part about this is rewarding people who actually want to help. Locals can register through a more in-depth process and report the spots and strategies. They get rewarded with either travel points from partner travel agencies or points (similar to Google Maps review system, there’s an exit you can aim for :)).

Benefits:

• Relatively simple to monetize: Free for users outside the country, paid once the tourist is geo-located in the specific country they’re trying to access. Clasic Advertising for more robust revenue streams as well.

• Once authority is built, the brand will be worth more than the platform (which is good, IP is easier to protect than simple tech).

• Multiple spin-offs and exits possible (travel agencies as partners, Google Maps/Tripadvisor etc.).

Challenges:

• It’s getting close to a marketplace model, so it will be hard (aka expensive) to populate with content in the beginning.

• Easy to replicate: There’s already hundreds of blogs reporting on these scams, you have to build a better authority online.

• System could be abused if implemented poorly: Locals could report competitor restaurants or actually dangerous areas if they are nefarious.

Problem: Both iCloud and Google Photos started to become expensive, complicated and unsafe (from a privacy perspective). Even though we take more photos than ever, we rarely look back on our memories. We’ve become hoarders of digital photos.

Google tried to change that by offering a Print Photo Album and automatically selecting your photos for it, but it barely took-off. So, what does the future of photo storage looks like?

Target: Initially, professional photographers/videographers shooting on mobile.

Solution: A simpler way to store photos and to manage them (duh!). A couple of potential features:

• Image search: Help me find the photos for my friend’s birthday without making me scroll through all my photos for minutes. I should just type in a search query and it should figure the rest out. To do this, the app could generate an description for each photo and store that in the photo’s metadata.

• Good photo sorting algorithm. When I click photos of people as memories, store it in a folder called “memories”; when I click documents, store it in “documents”. When i download videos from online, store them in such a folder.

• Auto-rotate, auto-crop etc. 

• From a bunch of similar photos (clicked in a burst), find the best one and delete the rest.

• Make it super easy to share the photos with friends (apple has a shared album, but it is really underdeveloped). Maybe even be able to recognize your friends faces and automatically share the photos with them.

• Make it easy to delete photos in bulk. You could just swipe left to delete, right to keep. No multi-step process to delete each photo; no trying to see what the photo was from the small icons.

• Make it super-easy to import/export photos and to pick different storage options except Google Photos and iCloud.

• Make sure privacy is respected for users.

Business-wise, this is the perfect VC-backable business. This won’t make money in the first 5 years until mass adoption. Right after, the monetization is simple: Get large storage companies (DropBox, Google Photos, iCloud) to pay to be advertised as a storage option. Multiple monetizing opportunities lay just beyond the corner: auto-edited videos, better native photo/video editing functions, print in multiple formats (photobooks, frames etc.)

Benefits:

• Easy to research and identify core features to build.

• Clear selling point, with the problem being important enough people are willing to pay.

• Huge potential if done right, unicorn-level.

Challenges:

• Fighting the giants: Google, Apple, Dropbox won’t let this market out of their hands too easily.

• Technical Moat: It’s obvious a very good engineer has to take this challenge on for the product to be succesful. Easily-copied features won’t protect the business for long.

• Huge switch cost: Asking someone to switch from their current gallery/photo storage will be the toughest nut to crack.

Problem: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people migrate in-and-out of countries nowadays. Whether we’re talking necessity-based migration, where you move for a better income, or desire-based migration, where you move to better enjoy your life (usually happening with older populations), there’s rarely a simplified method to fill-in migration paperwork and understand the new country’s requirments.

Governments are doing a pretty shitty job regarding migration and will also intentionally make it harder for people to get legal residence for more sought-after locations.

Target: Migrants (at first, wealthy, looking to move from US to Europe/Asia for a better lifestyle, then low-income looking to come to Europe/US for jobs).

Solution:

A migration copilot where you can upload digital copies of the most important documents, see procedures and steps required, limitations, maybe even alert you when your visa is about to expire and provide alternatives.

Problem: You visit a website, wanting to read an article. An annoying GDPR/cookie banner pops up. You just click accept and move on. Most of you data is now tracked by that website, including what other websites you visit next. You’re added to the retargeting ad library and now you’re visually assualted until you buy.

Target: European data-conscious internet users.

Solution: A google chrome plugin that automatically clicks reject all cookies, reject all tracking.

Don’t get me wrong, this will not be a multi-billion dollar startup. But it’s a great starting point. Building this, getting an audience from it and then asking them what else they’d like built for them is the real way to success.

Here is where to start, then a data-security startup is on the horizon.

Benefits:

• Super easy to build (takes a week tops).

• Easy to adopt/install, with a problem that obvious and easy to onboard users.

• Easy to distribute and market: just make a reel for it and let it go viral 🙂

Challenges:

• No monetization potential (for now)

• Requires some “creativity” in detecting pop-ups. (This could however be circumvented by detecting plugin names for wordpress sites and just checking most common placements).

• No moat, easy to copy by anyone else (most probably already exists btw, but it’s poorly advertised/promoted).

Problem: You want to learn how to cook, yet most tutorials and classes online don’t actually answer your questions and there is little interaction. You also don’t want to just learn the basics, but rather experiment, try new recipes and even find out some hidden tips and tricks.

Target: Young mothers and fathers (GenZ & Millenial) starting their cook-at-home journeys.

Solution:

A twitch-like platform where cooks/chefs can stream their process, talk to their audience and provide valuable insight into cooking. Community is the key word here: a lot of cooking influencers are currently riding a popularity wave and have launched multiple cook-books, tools and shows. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened yet.

Benefits:

• For chefs, an easy way to monetize their audiences and interact with them directly.

• For aspiring cooks, a live class that you can follow along, ask questions and learn together.

• For TV stations/studios, they can rent out their cooking show setup to individual influencers when not in use.

Challenges:

• Onboarding top influencers will be either expensive or competitive with other existing platforms.

• The initial audience will join the platform only if they find the top influencers there: it’s like youtube, if your artist leaves, you’re dead.

• Streaming tech is not cheap or easy to implement… and quality will make a difference when you’re figthing Kick and Twitch.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: You have a business, but the market you’re in is too small. You can launch in neighbouring countries, but you don’t know the rules, regulations and limits you have to respect in your industry.

𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁: SME, Startups, Local producers. 🗺

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: A platform where you describe your entire business and required documents and certificates. It then lets you know what other approvals you need from the countries you want to launch in to be able to operate legally.

✅ Able to satisfy more markets with less effort than before.

✅ One place to check and find required documents in case of a check from authorities.

✅ Speed to deployment vastly increases.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀:

❌ Keeping the platform updated with local regulations (These change so often it’s almost impossible to keep up. Almost…)

❌ Lack of trust (At first, the platform will not be trust-worthy enough, with entrepreneurs choosing the traditional path: lawyers)

❌ Legal liability (Is the platform responsible for someone filing their paperwork incorectly? The users might believe so…)

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: Our shipping industry is based around containers: from ship straight to truck, with little variation. Yet we usually don’t optimize the storage in shipping, choosing to send half-empty containers on a trip around the world just for the thrill of it.

𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁: Industrial ports, shipping providers, trucking companies.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: A digital-twin software that replicated the standard sizes of containers, but with a twist. Some items can’t be shipped together and that causes a lot of issues. For example, you can’t ship an expensive, luxury car in the same container as medicinal workout balls, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. No matter how well you package something inside the container, the rough seas and sometimes accidents can lead to damage anyway.

With this digital-twin, ship and truck operators could actually set some automated rules based on the content of the shipment: if products needs to sit upright, if product is perishable, if product is prone to cross-contamination etc. That way, only shipments that can work together will be shipped together, optimizing space and reducing the chance for accidents.

The best thing about this idea is that it already exists and is being implemented in more western countries. The electric transparent/opaque film has gotten really cheap as well, so this is as best of a time as ever to start this. The only thing missing is someone to sell it to the stores. Who knows, maybe there is a business model to discover there as well (renting the tech vs buying it outright vs cost per ad run).

✅ Technically-feasible, with some startups already working on similar tech.

✅ Easy to comprehend for potential customers, they understand the huge value-loss that comes with not utilizing 100% of the containers.

✅ Better tracking of what shipment goes where, in which truck, and why.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀:

❌ Complex implementation, as all rules and potential scenarios have to be mapped and made easily accesible to the operators.

❌ Few, large-scale clients, which can lead to a tougher sales effort without any intros into the industry.

❌ Rules and regulations of each country differ, in some you can’t ship certain products together, that has to be taken into account on the digital twin as well.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: You’re building a community (gamers, fashion fans, volunteers etc.). You’re looking for a way to reward them for their engagement and effort that isn’t monetary (maybe you’re thinking points, rewards, some gamified aspect). It’s hard to track however who received what and when and to keep the whole thing in check. You see then people trying to game the sytem by selling their rewards and it keeps on going.

𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁: Communities, organizations, large teams.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: A SAAS that helps you deploy a secondary “toy/game” economy. You can set your own rules (how often/what rewards are given, whether they can trade or not, what you can convert it to etc.). The first thought was probably: “Sounds like crypto to me”. Yes, it’s inspired by the economies that the whole crypto wave tried to create.

However, this would be a centralized model deployed as a secondary layer on a main activity of a group, it’s not the primary focus. If deployed well, it could serve as an added incentive/gamification layer for an organization.

✅ Better incentives for community members that maybe only engage with the free/low-tier perks of an organization.

✅ Flexible and easy-to-configure based on the requirments of each team. The ability to control the rules is key here as that offers most versatility.

✅ Business model realtively easy to implement as a SAAS. Very important to not try to generate a revenue line out of the economies themselves. They are disconnected to ensure reliable income.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀:

❌ Bias & Stigma: Whether it sounds good or not, there is still a lot of bias against anything that sounds remotely like crypto. Maybe the timing on this is not great.

❌ System abuse: It would need some pretty strong mechanism to protect against people trying to game the system and get “points” in the secondary economy.

❌ Niche case: This type of solution is not fit for anyone and it risks going into the territory of employers rewarding employees with more “fake money” than real money.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: Companies go bankrupt all the time, that’s nothing new. However, when they go bankrupt, their products still live on the market, like it’s the recent case for VanMoof e-bikes. With no support from the initial manufacturer, how is an individual supposed to maintain and repair their product? It becomes almost obsolete. Products shouldn’t die at the same time as the company.

𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁: Manufacturing businesses: electronics, automotive, industrial equipment.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: A marketplace (I’d suggest to make it niche-based) where customers can sell each other (verified) parts from discontinued products. This is already happening informally on second-hand sales platforms, but there are a lot of improvements that can be added: verification of both seller and what they’re selling, providers who can fill in the service for small parts by 3D printing them on-demand, tips and tricks on how to extend the product’s life from other users. The great thing about this is that the initial company that made the products is either non-existent or not interested in supporting the product, creating a wonderful gap for a platform like this to fill.

✅ Marketplace-style business, with fewer operations to handle compared to other alternatives.

✅ Freedom to provide additional support that would otherwise be stopped by IP laws and cease-and-desist from companies.

✅ A clear, already expressed need by users on other selling platforms + flexibility of creating this in multiple industries.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀:

❌ Smaller market: There aren’t a lot of people willing to repair and support old products, enthusiasts are the usual “suspects”.

❌ Safety and reputation: The platform will be vulnerable to bad-faith seller unless it sets up a system against that.

❌ Pricing: the enthusiasts sure are willing to spend more to keep their old products, but normal people might see the price for new parts matches buying a new one out-right. Then what? To research…

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: You’re a manufacturer who wants to go green, but you don’t even know what new materials you can use for packaging, production and in processes.

𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁: Manufacturing plants, Product Designers.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: A shopify platform where you can order only sustainable, made-for-circular use materials, like bioplastics, mycelium packaging and pineapple leather. 🍍

𝗕𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗶𝘁𝘀:

✅ “Dropshipping” useful, eco materials is easier to implement, as there are hundreds of tutorials on building a shopify store and selling through it.

✅ Demand of the market to meet ESG targets will only increase, and consumers are asking manufacturers to become more sustainable everyday.

✅ Distribution is not the strong suit of the developers of these new materials, you would be solving a huge problem for them.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀:

❌ Margins: Sustainable materials are already expensive, adding your margin on top certainly wouldn’t help demand…

❌ Quality-Check: What stops a material provider to sell a fake-eco product through your platform? How do you check? To research this.

❌ Regulation/compliance (especially in Europe): The materials have to comply to the standards of each country, the platform has to be localized and account for that.